Lecture Summary of the Day

Hi out there,

Today's lecture was looking at the ideal and nightmare societies that could evolve due to our embracing of technology, or in other words a Utopia verses Distopia.

The lecture began with two rather interesting quotes, the first from the movie Jurassic Park, "They were so obsessed with the fact that they could do it, they forgot to consider whether they should." This statement considers the ethical question of whether new technologies could be used for this theoretical ideal of 'for a good purpose' as opposed to the questionable practices that could come about such as this question of human cloning. This brings to bear this question of what is considered 'ethical', and can it be applied in a global setting? The real problem is that what is considered ethical, is very much entrenched in the societal norms in that place and time, if something is perfectly legal and acceptable where you live, does that mean it will be acceptable in an other country, or even in the same place but in a years time.

This was perfectly demonstrated in the movie "Alphaville" which we watch a portion of at the end of the lecture, every character in the movie smoked cigarettes, which at that time was a normal thing to do, if we were to move the story of the movie into present times it would not be allow to be screened because everyone smoked. This demonstrates that it is the societal norms in that time and place that dictates what is considered ethical behavior.

This brings us back to today's topic of the development of a societal Utopia through the use of technology. A researcher called Marshall McLuhan, theorized that there are three stages of media development, the oral (spoken word); the literate (written words); and Electric (which is...televisual,digital). A student of McLuhan called Robert K. Logan continued McLuhan's work by stating that he believe that there are a five stages of media ages by adding the 'mimetic age' and the 'interactive/digital age'.

McLuhan's first electronic media age is focused on a few centralized providers disseminating information to many receivers. For multiple reasons, only certain people could produce and send content; there were educational, financial and technical restrictions to those who could produce, and to those who could distribute.

Which brings us to the second (electronic) media age - decentralized interactions. This media age is characterized by distributed systems of interaction. the interactivity of the internet is simultaneously being worked out in associated technologies such as DVD's and Virtual Reality.

This raises the issue of who controls this new media, as postmodernist is built upon modernism, the second media age is build on the first and is therefore depended on the world view inherent in existing technologies. It is this combining of old and new technologies that new industries and uses have developed. With this new media brings a a need for new understandings, political ones in particular, to protect the public interest. Some of the questions that need to be raised are, the means to protect rights of access; equity in access; the means to strengthen and enhance existing community structures; the development of a global community; the development of strategies for developing, implementing and enforcing global laws; international intellectual property laws; and the freedom of speech.

Which brings us back to the lecture topic Utopia verses Dystopia. The statement 'technology itself has often been visualized as Utopia - somewhere we can create, a microcosmic recreation of nature sanitized and optimized for human consumption with all the hazards of life stripped away by the technology'. The question becomes, will this technology provide us with something that is better than our current reality. There are many examples of this in the current media, one of them being the 'Better Than Life' video game from the Red Dwarf TV series, this theme is also looked at in the Matrix movies, where humans have been reduced to living their lives in a digitally created world completely oblivious to their actual surroundings.

The problem with such a society is that if someone or something turns off the power, you may find that your technological utopia is something more akin to a dystopia.

There has been only a few Utopian societies in literature in the 20th century, however there have been quite a few Dystopias, with the works of Aldous Huxley's 'A Brave New World' and George Orwell's '1984', which pointed out that language could be corrupted into 'newspeak' to obscure the truth.

With the development of these new communication technologies comes another set of mythologies, focused on the transcendence of death, nature and humanity, this is dealt with rather well in the 'Ghost In The Shell: SAC' series which is set in the future where cyber-brains and cyborg bodies have become the norm. The show touches on the philosophical question of, what makes us human, is it the body that we exist in which sends electrical signals to our brains so that we can interpret the world around us, or is it the brain itself, and if we can take an image of the brain and a life times worth of experiences and digitize it will it be the person or just a digital representation of the flesh form. Basically can we replace the brain with a computer that holds all our experiences, that can learn in the same way normal brains would and retain what it is that makes us, human.

It seems that even in Utopian societies (in the film word as least) the peace is disrupted by people who seek to exercise their own human agency and free will.

As stated in the lecture notes, nothing epitomizes the cybernautic desire to transcend the body's limitations more than the fantasy of abandoning the flesh and downloading oneself to cyber-immortality.

In conclusion however we choose to view ourselves and the spaces we occupy, virtual or otherwise, with the advent of cyberspace, our conception of the world and ourselves is more than likely to change. Like Copernicus, we are privileged to witness the dawning of a new kind of space. Only time will tell, how we decide to integrate it into our culture.

Well that's it for another entry. Bye